Between the Notes: Finding Asian America in Popular Music

Abstract

When asked to explain the premise behind the Broadway musical he helped create and direct-Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da FunkGeorge C. Wolfe wrote, I'm interested in how, if you actively unearth popular culture and look inside it, you can find all kinds of secrets and truths and rhythms of a time period, much more than you find in written history.' Wolfe's conjecture validates forms of expressive public culture2 that are repositories for narratives that can capture the meanings of an era with more accuracy than the official historical record. In fact, with traditional historical methodologies coming under increasing critique within the academy, cultural documents are becoming all the more important as potential sites of knowledge. It is not that they are any more objectively true, but they can offer alternative and complementary histories or, in some cases, be the only history left to examine. By examining examples of popular music drawn from the last forty years, one can peer into the history of Asian America itself-its changing social, political and cultural identities, its larger relationship to the national/ cultural symbol of America, its remembrances of the past and its visions for the future. I don't mean to suggest that music is didactically reflective of society, as only a one-way relationship existed, only that music has always been a site for more than just entertainment or commercial enterprise within Asian America.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 85 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.